Can Visual Studio show me which assertion failed? - c++

I normally work with Qt Creator for my C++ needs. When an assertion in my program fails, it can show me which assertion failed. In Visual Studio, I only see this:
I can click Retry to jump into the application, but it doesn't tell me which assertion failed. Even for a simple assert(false) Visual Studio tries to show me the source code for msvcr100d.dll, which isn't available.
How can I find out which assertion in my program failed? I really don't want to do a cumbersome manual search using a combination of breakpoints and std::couts for something that can be tracked down automatically.
Edit: Visual Studio did in fact generate a .PDB file for me, but it still isn't working. Although the debugger won't highlight the line with the failed assertion, I do see Assertion failed: false, file main.cpp, line 8 on the command line. Why can't it just show me the line and let me inspect the variables? I mean, all the information appears to be available...


All you should have to do is click "Retry" to break into the application's source code with the debugger. That will highlight the line containing the assertion that failed, so it's easy to see the culprit unless you like to cram multiple nested assertions onto a single line. And if you do, then you deserve all the pain that this might cause you.
The reason it's not working for you now is more than likely because you don't have the debugging symbols available from your application's current build. When you build an app with the compiler bundled with Visual Studio, depending on your project settings, it will generate a .PDB file, which contains the debug symbols. These are required to get useful information while debugging, such as what line produced the last failure.
Make sure that when you compile your application, you have it set to generate debug symbols. You should see a .PDB file in your /bin directory. As discussed here, the generation of debug symbols is orthogonal to whether optimizations are enabled (the configuration typically known as "Release").
Update: I just realized you're probably compiling/building the app in Qt Creator, and then trying to debug the binaries from Visual Studio. That's not going to work out well—if you don't compile using VS's tools, it's not going to generate debug symbols that the VS debugger can read.
I assume the problem would be the same in reverse: if you built with Visual Studio, then tried to debug with Qt Creator, it probably wouldn't be able to interpret the debugging symbols, either.
Therefore, I'd recommend sticking with a single toolset for building. It doesn't matter which IDE you use, but you'll need to compile/build with the same tools. You can configure either Qt Creator or Visual Studio to use the compiler and linker bundled with the other. Typically Qt Creator comes with a Win32 port of GCC, but it's trivial to get it to build with Microsoft's toolset instead, which would allow you to use VS to debug your code.

Related

How do I view code in Visual Studio in Release Mode?

When I change from debug to release mode in Visual Studio and the code is being optimized after debugging in Release Mode, can I see what the optimized code looks like? Or it is already a binary code that is optimized so Visual Studio itself doesn't optimize the code by rewriting it in C++, so there is no any C++ code that is my code but already rewritten for optimalization.

The following works for both Debug and Release builds:
Set a breakpoint on the line(s) of interest.
Launch your program under the debugger (F5).
When your program breaks, right-click and select 'Go To Disassembly'.
But just to say, the code generated by the compiler in Release mode is not always easy to follow so be prepared for some surprises.
[Edit] As per #paddy's comment above, make sure that you compile your project with debugging information included, otherwise none of this will work properly:
Project properties -> C/C++ -> General -> Debug Information Format = Program Database (/Zi)

Visual studio compiling failed without any errors [duplicate]

I have a WebApplication which contains reference to WCF services.
While building using Visual Studio 2010, Build fails without any error or warning. However building the .csproj using MsBuild is successful.
Can't figure out what should I try in Visual Studio, to resolve / diagnose the issue. Can you please help out?
I find out that the build has been failing,
From text displayed in status Bar.
From output window:
========== Build: 0 succeeded or up-to-date, 1 failed, 0 skipped ==========
The output tab includes configuration details.
------ Build started: Project: <projectName here> Configuration: Debug Any CPU

I noticed that if "Build + Intellisense" is selected in the Error List, it causes the error messages to be swallowed.
Change this option to "Build Only", and all error messages will be displayed:
I don't know if this is a bug in Visual Studio or what, but it certainly revealed hidden error messages that were the key to pinpointing the failure for me.
Some, like Richard J Foster, have suggested increasing the "MSBuild project build output verbosity" setting to "Diagnostic" (the highest possible option), but this didn't solve the problem for me, as Visual Studio appeared to be suppressing the error message(s) themselves.
As an alternative, you may try to use the raw output messages from the "Output" tab, which haven't been filtered by Visual Studio. Either do an in-place search for the strings "error" and/or "failed", or copy all of the output to your favorite text editor and do a search there.
To ensure that the Output window appears each time you do a build, you can go to Tools → Options → Projects and Solutions → General, and ensure that the option "Show Output Window when build starts" is checked.
As an additional troubleshooting step, it is also possible to build the project from the PowerShell command line by running dotnet build. This will show you the complete build output, including any errors that Visual Studio may be hiding.

I just ran into a similar situation. In my case, a custom action (from the MSBuildVersioning package available on Nuget.org - http://www.nuget.org/packages/MSBuildVersioning/) which appeared in the csproj file's BeforeBuild target was failing without triggering any error message in the normal place.
I was able to determine this by setting the "MSBuild project build output verbosity" (in the latest Visual Studio's Tools tab [Path: Tools > Options > Build and Run]) to "Diagnostic" as shown below. This then showed that the custom action (in my case HgVersionFile) was what had failed.

Here are some things that you can try:
If your solution contains more than one project, try building each project one at a time. (You may even want to try opening each project independently of the solution.)
If applicable, ensure that all of your projects (including dependencies and tests) target the same version of the .NET Framework. (Thanks to user764754 for this suggestion!)
Tip: Check Tools → Extension and Updates to ensure that your packages are up-to-date.
Ensure that all dependency projects are built to target the same platform as your main project.
Try restarting Visual Studio.
As suggested by Bill Yang, try running Visual Studio as Administrator, if you aren't already. (If you are already running Visual Studio as Administrator, perhaps try the opposite?)
Try restarting your computer.
Try "Rebuild All".
Run "Clean Solution", then remove your *vspscc* and *vssscc* files, restart Visual Studio, and then "Rebuild All".
As suggested by Andy, close Visual Studio, delete the .suo file, and restart Visual Studio.
As suggested by Arun Prasad E S, close Visual Studio, delete the .vs folder in your solution directory, and then re-open Visual Studio. (This folder is auto-generated by Visual Studio and contains cache, configuration settings, and more. More details can be found in these questions: Visual Studio - Deleting .vs folder and https://stackoverflow.com/q/48897191.)
As suggested by MrMalith, close Visual Studio, delete the obj folder in your solution directory, clear your temporary folder, and then re-open Visual Studio.

Delete the hidden .vs folder & restart Visual Studio. That worked for me.

I want to expand on Sasse's answer. I had to target the correct version of .NET to resolve the problem.
One project was giving me an error:
"The type or namespace name 'SomeNamespace' does not exist in the namespace 'BeforeSomeNamespace' (are you missing an assembly reference?)".
There was no error in the Error List window but the assembly had a yellow warning sign under "References".
I then saw that the referencing project targeted 4.5.1 and the referenced project 4.6.1. Changing 4.6.1 to 4.5.1 allowed the overall build to succeed.

Nothing was working for me so I deleted the .suo file, restarted VS, cleaned the projected, and then the build would work.

I tried many things like restarting Visual Studio, cleaning and rebuilding the solution, restarting the PC, etc., but none of them worked for me. I was finally able to solve the problem by doing the following:
First of all, make sure all the projects in your solution (including tests) are targeting the same .NET version. Then:
Save pending changes in the project and close Visual Studio
Find the exact location from file explorer and find "obj" file and open it,
Then, delete all the included files (some files won't remove, it doesn't matter, just skip them).
Use run command (by pressing Windows Key + R) and type "%temp%" and press enter to find temporary files.
Finally, delete them all.

On other possibility is that Visual Studio needs to run as Administrator, this might be related to deploying to local IIS server or other deployment need.

Just for the sake of completion and maybe helping someone encountering the same error again in the future, I was using Mahapps metro interface and changed the XAML of one window, but forgot to change the partial class in the code-behind. In that case, the build failed without an error or warning, and I was able to find it out by increasing the verbosity of the output from the settings:

In my case (VS 2019 v16.11.20), disabling Text Editor->C#->Advanced->Enable 'pull' diagnostics in the options solved the issue.

Double check for _underscore.aspx pages in your project.
I had a page and code-behind:
`myPage.aspx` and `myPage.aspx.vb`
when building the project, I'd get errors on the .aspx.vb page stating that properties defined on the .aspx page didn't exist, even though the page itself would build fine and there were NO OTHER ERRORS showing in the output (even with diagnostic level build output).
I then came across a page in the project that was named the same thing but with an underscore: _myPage.aspx - not sure where it came from, I deleted it, and the solution built fine.

Visual Studio 2012 does not generate exe

I've a C++ project in Visual Studio 2012 Express, and I started having problems lately. When I compile the project it works, nothing wrong, however when I try to execute it the .exe disappears. I mean, I compile the project, the project generates the exe file with no problems, but if I try to execute it from Visual Studio or directly from the output directory, Windows say to me:
Cannot start the program 'C:\Users\Adrian\Dropbox\MyApp\Debug\MyApp.exe'.
The system can not find the file specified
If I create another project, Hello World for example, there is no problem and the exe generates and executes good. So I guess the problem is specific to my project. I tried disabling Avast (because maybe he delete the file) and the problem persists.
Also I create another project, including the files and... the problem is still here...
I check the project options, specifically general and debug options and I see nothing wrong.
So does anyone have an idea what may be wrong?
The output directory is $(SolutionDir)$(Configuration)\ and I'm compiling in Debug mode.

The windows error message is misleading. It should state that, loading a library (dll) failed. You might run the program with a process monitor (see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx)

Why won't my C++/Win32 project work outside of Visual Studio?

I have a rather large project I'm working on in C++/Win32, and now that I'm nearing completion, I wanted to start testing it on other machines. My project works great in Visual Studio - either in Debug or Release mode. However, if I try to run either executable from its build directory (with all of the supporting files in place) they crash. I tried using the debug feature provided by visual studio, and it opened malloc.c, saying that a heap has been corrupted. If I had a memory leak or something somewhere, why wouldn't I be getting this error when I run my project from Visual Studio? I could use some pointers on how to debug what the problem might be.

I don't think that is due to memory leak. It has happened to me too when I tried to copy only the compiled executable but not depend libraries. So just check whether all depend libraries are available in other systems too.

WDK C++ Project Needs to change debug compiler strictness

I'm relatively new at drivers with WDK and Visual Studio.
When I compile project in debug mode I get no warnings or errors and project compiles and runs fine. However, when I compile in release mode, compilation stops and I get an error stating that a warning was found and is being treated as an error. The details of this are dumped into a log file found at the project root dir.
What I would like to do is have the compiler in debug mode be as strict as the release mode compiler. Currently they are both at default. The release mode seems stricter. I am using VS 2010 and WDK. I'm not sure how to do this. It would be ideal if this setting was at the VS level and not at a per project level.
Also, It would be great if the warnings would show up in VS IDE instead of a log file.

Visual Studio has different configuration setting for debug and release mode.
Check whether do you have relevant configuration in project > project properties -> linker etc......
If there is mismatch between debug and release mode configuration then change it. This should work
--Ali Chachar
--Pakistan

There are code differences in the debug and release compilation that may lead to warnings unrelated to strictness of the compiler. Most noticeable is in the logs; in the release version KdPrint/KdPrintEx calls will be discarded. There is a good chance that some of your function input parameters are used for printing only and in case it's being omitted you'll end up with unused parameter warnings - this is the most frequent difference in debug vs. release compilations.
Even if you have a VS2010 solution, your driver isn't being compiled with the VS compiler but rather with the WDK compiler so VS settings are irrelevant here. You can migrate your solution to VS2012 which have driver support integrated.